COMPASS WAS USED BY THE ABORIGINES OF AMERICA.

Donnelly says: “In A. D. 868 it was employed by the Northmen.” (The Landnamabok, vol. 1, chap. 2.) An Italian poem of A. D. 1190 refers to it as in use among the Italian sailors at that date. In the ancient language of the Hindoos, the Sanscrit—which has been a dead language for twenty-two hundred years—the magnet was called ‘the precious stone beloved of iron.’ The Talmud speaks of it as ‘the stone of attraction; and it is alluded to in the early Hebrew prayers as ‘Kalamitah,’ the same name given to it by the Greeks, from the reed upon which the compass floated. . . . In the year 2700 B. C. the Emperor (of China) Wangti placed a magnetic figure with an extended arm, like the Astarte of the Phoenicians, on the front of carriages, the arm always turning and pointing to the south, which the Chinese regarded as the principal pole.” Atlantis, pp. 440-443.

“Chinese invented the mariners compass eleven centuries before Christ.”—See Light in Darkness, by J. E. and A. H. Godbey, p. 289.

“Earliest references to the use of the compass are to be found in Chinese history, form which we learn how in the sixty-fourth year of the reign of Ho-ang-ti (2634 B. C.) the Emperor Hiuan-yuan, or H-ang-ti, attacked one Tchiyeou, on the plains of Tchou-lou, and finding his army embarrassed by a thick fog raised by the enemy, constructed a chariot (Tchinan) for indicating the south, so as to distinguish the four cardinal points, and was thus enabled to pursue Tchi-yeou and take him prisoner.”—Encyclopaedia Brittanica, vol. 6, p. 226.

Chambers’ Encyclopedia: “It appears, however, on very good authority, that it [compass] was known in China, and throughout the east generally, at a very remote period.”—Vol. 2, p. 546. (Book of Mormon, p. 63.)